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Elanor has been a busy girl today.
She has gotten a heart ultrasound, a head ultrasound, a stomach ultrasound and a kidney ultrasound. She has gone off a few antibiotics (for diseases we have been able to rule out). Best of all, her breathing tube came out about an hour and a half ago and Ravi and I have both been able to hold her-Ravi is holding her now.
The MRI results were read and the person who specializes in baby brain MRI’s said that there was no need to do the other CT scan. There will be some follow up, but there are no clots, which was the big worry this morning.
Getting her breathing tube out is a huge step towards being able to leave the PICU. She’ll also need to improve her kidney function a bit (she’s processing urine, but she has high creotine (spelling) levels and while they are resolving slowly, they’d want them more stable before they let her off the floor). There are probably a few other criteria as well, but right now our understanding is that she’ll hopefully be leaving the PICU mid-week next week for a regular pediatric room until her course of antibiotics is through and they are happy with her progress and such.
We can’t wait to post a few pictures of her without her tubes! Like her mom, Elanor’s skin gets very irritated where there was tape, but she is looking more and more like herself.
For those of you who have been lucky enough to see it, you’ll know what we mean when we say that we got to see her turtle face today.
We also got her to hear her voice for the first time in days…it’s a beautiful sound (if still a bit quiet as she recovers from the breathing tube).
Elanor had a very good night last night.
Her condition in unchanged–nothing new in terms of issues.
They were able to do the spinal tap. The bacteria cultures will take 48 hours to grow, but we already know they’ll be negative as one of the antibiotics Elanor has been on is for meningitis and that could mask the result. However, her white blood cell count from her spinal fluid is already back and that showed NO white blood cells in her spinal fluid. This is important because our primary doctor said that regardless of cultures, a quick way to tell if she were to have meningitis would be the white blood cell count of her spinal fluid and the absence of white blood cells would indicate the absence of meningitis. If he still feels the same as yesterday, this will mean that she’ll come off at least one medication today.
Elanor also finally got her feeding tube put in and is now getting 2cc’s (about 1/15th of an ounce) of expressed breast milk an hour. As she hasn’t used her digestive system in a few days, this is a good way to slowly reintroduce food to her body and digestive tract. She got pretty feisty when they tried to put it in–even though she’s still pretty out of it, she started moving her arms and legs around and got pretty annoyed with us, which was great to see. She also evidenced that her suck reflex had returned because at one point she helped them by sucking the tube down her throat (which is what babies her age do–it’s a reflex they can’t control).
Every day she looks a little better.
Now we wait for the MRI results…which of course have us a little on edge. Things are going really well in the infection department…it’s the brain bleed and the possibility of permanent damage that has us scared. Regardless of what they tell us, we’re just grateful that she’s alive and we’ll deal with whatever news they give us, and she’ll get whatever she needs.
Thank you for all the continued good thoughts sent our way.
